The Things They Carried
by amy-oblique
Summary: In the midst of war, you can only take with you what you can afford to carry. In a war that threatens to destroy all, what burdens are more important than life?


Characters and related themes from naruto, which I do not own.

The idea is borrowed from Tim O' Brien's novel, _The Things they Carried, _because I think the theme expressed in that book is shared in the ninja narutoverse, and I thought it might be fun to tinker with. Incidentally, I do not believe I own Tim's book and related stuffs.

_The Things They Carried_

It was the twilight days of the shinobi. A great schism had found its way into the midst of shinobi society, one that fractured all the villages into entangling alliances and hostile factions.

The cloud, the mist, and the stone meshed together into a beast of unknown proportions, surreptitiously taking out small backwater ninja villages and stifling the civilian ones surrounding them. It was imperialism in the clearest sense, and it carried with it all the bloody repercussions of such an undertaking.

The golden age of the ninja had passed, and what lay ahead was another great shinobi war that would eventually wipe them out in such great numbers that most villages could never hope to recover. It was in these times, that those who hid in the leaves spent their days preparing for the conflict that would eventually lead to the capitulation of their way of life.

Missions, the Godaime had called them, even passed them out in sealed scrolls, with complete ceremony and ritual, but everyone knew what they really were.

They would have liked to believe it was just reconnaissance, like the papers said. Take your team and head west, keep a lookout for suspicious figures A and B. Hostility from any other parties should be regarded with the utmost seriousness and "handled" immediately.

_Station your selves at the appointed battle front. _

_Kill on sight. Or it is you who will die. _

That's what those words really meant, but to speak them aloud would only invite the chaos to come sooner. And so, the stationing of soldiers would come to pass, and the finest individuals in all allied villages would come to clash with one another.

Missions were weeks long, sometimes even months. It took days to get anywhere by conventional shinobi means, aka, hopping from tree to tree for as long as the wilderness would allow, sprinting in the deepest of shadows and sleeping only a few precious hours at a time. The mission objective (the battlefront) was stationed far from Konoha to avoid entangling conflicts.

The things they carried with them depended largely on necessity. A shinobi had to be light on his feet, and extra weight could mean the difference between a close shave and a missing ear. Shuriken, kunai, scrolls, caltrops and the like added up to about three or four pounds of weight strapped directly onto the waist.

Food and what rations could be spared from the ravages of time and nature were usually dry, flavorless, and up to a half pound of weight, carried in the pockets and usually in the form of soldier pills. Bivouacs and tarps used for sleeping were given to one member of the team, a pound extra. Larger weapons, like swords and giant shuriken, added up to and extra ten pounds, varying by quality. Extra shoes, clothes, ammo, water, and anything else added more and more onto the shinobi's weight, garnering him a debilitation in speed, which might one day prove fatal. It all added up. The difference between life and death often relied on the things they carried.

The Things they carried also depended on importance. Some of the greener shinobi's really believed they were just going on reconnaissance, and packed for such. Others felt the stone of trepidation mold in their stomachs, knowing very well that this might be the last time they had at cherishing those trivial yet needed material possessions…

_Kakashi_

Kakashi carried a worn out copy of Come Come Paradise, a photo of three dead individuals and himself, and the weight of the dead that rested firmly on has shoulders.

It was the first in the series, his favorite, and devoid of the violence and politics of the other two novels, Come Come Violence and Come Come Tactics. War would have enough violence and politics to last him a few lifetimes. The photo added hardly any weight, and was taken as an afterthought. He used it as a bookmark, and sometimes stared into the picture with his one good eye, and let himself remember things. Let himself travel back in time, back to Obito and Rin and his blonde, kind faced sensei. He would read the lines of Paradise and dream of those people in that photo, and Obito would die again.

Rin would walk off the side of a mountain. That kind face would smile sadly once more before turning to ash in the face of a Shinigami and the horrible cruel grin of a fox.

But sometimes, when Gai would cry tears of joy just looking at a sunset and Kurenai would roll her eyes and suggest they move on, Rin would smile and float right back up from the underbrush, her bones unbroken and her neck turned the right way; and Kakashi would casually place his eye back into that empty socket and Obito would smile from underneath his rock. It was a morbid thought, but underneath his mask he was smiling his strange ambiguous and enigmatic smile. He imagined his body one with the earth, his face lying halfway under stone and halfway above. _Why, hello Kakashi. Haven't seen you around in a while…using my eye for perverted things, I hope?_

Sometimes, Kakashi would take off his headband over his eye when chakra could be spared, and allowed Obito to read the torrid affairs of Paradise through him. Obito would blush from under his rock and tell him to put it away, only half serious. Rin would sigh and say something about disgusting fascinations of the male mind while giggling at the text from her place in his photo bookmark, and that same sad smile…he guessed, would always be just a little sad.

Gai was going on about something or other, youth this springtime that. Kurenai looked about to throttle him when something black and shiny whizzed past. Kakashi had been reading. Had he caught it sooner, he might have seen the invisible assailant cast the exploding kunai their way. Maybe he could have warned Kurenai before she stepped in its path. Maybe Gai, in a heroic feat that fit his nature, wouldn't have thrown himself over the would be bomb.

The damages weren't severe. Kurenai had a scratch on the leg. Gai smiled, a shining glint radiating off his insanely white teeth, as he patted his toned stomach where flesh had been slightly rendered. _Perhaps I am not in the springtime of my youth, but I am not wilted yet! _Gai's insane regimen of keeping himself in body-builder esque shape had saved him. At least, they had thought so.

On Gai's funeral pyre, Kakashi burned his book and his photo. He wore the charred kunai that had lead to the fatal internal bleeding around his neck. He had saved it as an afterthought. Rin and Obito came alive no more, and instead, a burning Gai would greet him in his dreams, spouting off one bad pun after another about how hot or smoking he was. Kakashi would smile a strange, enigmatic smile, and Kurenai would sobb.

Kakashi carried with him now a charred kunai and the souls of three, now four, dead individuals. He was aware of this weight, and somehow wasn't sure whether they were dragging him down or keeping him above the surface.

_Shikamaru _

Shikamaru, as the leader of his team, carried extra rations to be used in times of need. He carried flares for when they needed help, he carried extra communicating devices, and the cursed scroll that they had been given by the Godaime. Each extra weight pressed him down, and being a smart shinobi, he knew the consequences of a load too heavy.

But in his pocket, Shikamaru was able to find space for his special burdens. A pack of cigarettes, an animal's bone, a knight off a shougi board, and a ring folded from paper.

The animal's bone was that of a deer's, a horn that his father had hollowed out and spit into. He handed it to Shikamaru with an inebriated sort of smile on the day he became a Chuunin. He said it was something all Nara's gave to their children upon becoming Chuunin, but Shikamaru knew very well his father had made it up on the spot and was just being weird again.

It hadn't left his side since.

The knight off the shougi board was a homage to his late sensei, Asuma, who had compared his lazy student to that very piece once before his death. Shikamaru used it as a worry stone, long abandoning his practice of touching the tips of his fingers to one another and instead rubbing his thumb over the kanji on the wooden piece when he needed to think. It was troublesome, taking it out every time, but is had become a ritual.

Another thing that had become a ritual for him was sneaking off into the woods after his team had set up camp and smoking. Kiba sighed at this when he noticed Shikamaru missing and the black smoke trailing up to the woodland tops, muttering something about giving away their position. Sakura and Naruto would come to his defense and attribute it to Asuma's death. Chouji, knowing better, would lie back, occasionally inferring cryptically that that wasn't the reason at all, and munched on a handful of dry rations.

It was true, that it had been Asuma's death that had introduced Shikamaru to the hell sticks. But when he lit the end and let the fumes layer his lungs in black tar, he wasn't thinking of his late sensei. He would close his eyes, letting the ashen smoke cloud his mind and his soul and sink once again into tan skin and blonde hair.

They had always met in secret. Holding hands when no one was looking. Stealing kisses under the shadows. Her hand or foot creeping up his leg, driving him insane with desire, under the tables where chuunin exam meetings took place.

It was the most troublesome thing he had ever had to do, secretly being with her. It was illegal; he had looked it up, in bog bold letters on the shinobi do not list. _No shinobi may share intimate relations with a shinobi of another village _and about fifteen reasons why, only five being valid in any sense. But five was enough to put them in jail. Five was enough to make sure they never saw each other again. Five was enough to present a challenge.

It was part of the reason they loved each other, despite obvious differences. That they were smart enough to carry on a covert relationship, a shinobi love in a sense. It was troublesome, yes. Very much so. But her presence, they way fire seemed to dance in her eyes, her intellect, and the way she snarled like a possessive little kid when he talked with other girls made the troublesome things worthwhile. The fact that any woman could make him forego his own comfort for the sake of something he felt was much more important was a feat in itself.

The night before the war, they had pledged themselves to one another. The rolled up leaves and paper and made impromptu rings, half smiling at the absurdity of it all, half crying because their shinobi love had to be carried out in the shadows. It was fitting, he thought sometimes, him being a shadow warrior, but she was a maiden of the sun. A desert rose. There were so many subtle hints from God that this was simply not meant to be, but they had both stopped caring about what anyone, even God, had to say about their love.

He inhaled the ashen scent of smoke, and remembered her hair cascading like golden streams down her bare shoulders. Her smooth, sand and sweat stained legs from the three day sprint from Sunagakure that she had made in two. Those firey eyes slightly softer in the moonlight, that made his hear explode in his chest knowing that at least for that moment, they were looking only at him.

_I love you. _

The smoky clouds wafted up to the sky. Who had said it first? It was all a blur. They had found an old temple, incense still smoking inside, and done it right there and then just to spite God and everything else that threatened now to tear them apart. The next morning they'd be leaving for war for their own countries. They weren't stupid; they knew this was it. Their last night. And the smoky inscence, the sad tragedy of it all, and the stupid war and rules and God penetrated their souls and smashed them together. They were one soul, without a name, without a home except for inside eachother.

He took one last long drag. Everything had come out that night. He remembered her calling out his name, and him calling hers between soft kisses and heavy breath.

It was all they could say. It hurt so much. This was all they had left, and it twisted inside their gut how much they had wanted this and how soon it would be taken away.

_Shikamaru…_

_Shikamaru…_

He exhaled, letting one last cloud float up to the sky.

_Temari. _

He crushed the butt underneath his foot.

I'm considering this my first real fic, since the other two I wrote were dumb "couldn't sleep after reading chapter 328" one shots which I hope I can one day forget and blame on drugs and immaturity.

Read them if you want a good laugh at my attempt at angst and tragedy…ha hah.

I might continue this with the other characters, depending on whether or not anyone reads this.


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